03 September 2014

HelpDesk For Outlook Folders Updated

Today we have released a minor update of the kalmstrom.com incident management add-on for Outlook. It is often used by helpdesk staff, and as it is installed in an Outlook folder we call it Folder HelpDesk.

New design
I call this update a minor one, as most of the changes are made to remove non-crucial bugs. Standard Subscribers will however see the difference at once as we have replaced the old Folder HelpDesk logotype with a new and more modern one. (Premium Subscribers will not see this, as they have
their own logotype in Folder HelpDesk.)

Search closed tickets
A new feature has also been added – or two, actually. Both are enhancements of the search closed tickets application.

Folder HelpDesk shows the open cases as tickets in Outlook, where you can work with them without leaving Outlook. When they are closed, they are still stored in an Access or SQL Server database, and you just have to press a button to search and re-open them.

Big organizations with many incidents or support cases will have a large number of closed tickets when they have used Folder HelpDesk for a while. To speed up the search they can now avoid to include the ticket body when searching closed tickets. For many hits there is also a new possibility to decide how many of them should be shown.You can select any number, from 1 to 999.

Public folder or shared mailboxFolder HelpDesk can be installed in any Outlook folder, but for sharing support cases it should be installed in a public folder or a shared mailbox. The earlier versions were called Public Folder HelpDesk, but from version 12 we changed the name to just Folder HelpDesk.

We no longer wanted to point to a public folder installation, as installation in a shared mailbox also works well. In the kalmstrom.com Tips section, under the Outlook heading in the table of contents, we have instructions on how to create a shared mailbox on the Exchange server or in Office 365 and on how to add a shared mailbox to a local Outlook installation.

SharePointAnother reason for the name change from version 12 was that we already saw the need for SharePoint as a third sharing and storage option for Folder HelpDesk. When that is implemented, there will be no need for an Exchange server at all.Folder HelpDesk will no longer rely on a shared network folder and an Outlook public folder/shared mailbox. Instead we will use the three options for sharing and storage of data already present in Kanban Task Manager for Outlook and KBase for Outlook: an Access database, an SQL Server database or a SharePoint site.

I hope this vision for Folder HelpDesk will become reality in 2015. While enhancing the solution the kalmstrom.com developers are always aware of the direction we have agreed on. Today's update was one step of many.

Upgrade or try
Subscribers who are using an earlier version of Folder HelpDesk for Outlook are welcome to upgrade their installations.

Have you not tried Folder HelpDesk yet? Please download the solution and evaluate it for 30 days. The manual and the various video demonstrations will help you get started, and you are always welcome to contact us if you have questions.